Ethan Zuckerman Quotations

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.

The benefits and consequences of globalization have a great deal to do with whether we're intelligent and thoughtful about how we approach globalization, or whether we're blindly accepting... or blindly resistant.

It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.

Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity.

The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.

A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.

There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.

When you sign up for Facebook, the service first searches for any mentions of your name and suggests you befriend anyone who has mentioned you in their posts. It then asks to access your e-mail account so you can connect with anyone with whom you regularly correspond.

On the Internet, information from Indiana and India is equally cheap and easy to access.

It's my fond hope that social networks such as Facebook will help users broaden their perspectives by listening to a different set of people than they encounter in their daily life. But I fear services such as Facebook may be turning us into imaginary cosmopolitans.

People generally pay attention to what they already know about and what they care about.

I study the ways new media shapes people's perceptions of the world.

Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart.

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

Teenagers try to hide what's really going on in their communication online.

The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.

It's become relatively commonplace to find corners of Africa that have good cell coverage but no electrical power.

Increasingly, I'm inspired by entrepreneurs who run nonprofit organizations that fund themselves, or for-profit organizations that achieve social missions while turning a profit.

Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with.

On Twitter, if you want to quote someone else, you say, 'RT, re-tweet, that person's name, and then what they said before.' And it's a way of essentially saying, 'I'm not saying this, but my friend said this and I thought this was interesting.'

Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.

Talking about 'stopping globalization' is unrealistic - and probably not what anti-globalization protesters actually want.

I can imagine Iceland becoming a good place to run a controversial Web site. But... Iceland may find itself forced to defend controversial speech.

Reddit, which calls itself 'The Front Page of the Internet,' is more influential in shaping Internet culture than its comparatively small reach would lead you to believe.

We are trying to do a transfer of technology that allows people to express themselves without taking risks. It is about free speech, that's all.

When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories.

When you look at the 'New York Times,' you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we've invaded.

Sometimes you need the things you didn't know you needed to know.

The U.S. media have done a shameful job of reporting on the Arab world.

The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.

I can read a lot of French newspapers with Google Translate and have them read quite comfortably.

The term 'cyberutopian' tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.

Creativity is an import-export business.

Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.

Cute. I'm on the waitlist to beta a new product, and have been offered the chance to move up in the list if I tweet about it. Not doing so.

People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people.

Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.

If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?

The Internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be.

Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it's commonplace for users to create 'throwaway' accounts to reveal sensitive information.

When I'm playing with circular saws, I'm offline (though often listening to podcasts) and when I sit in the cabin to read or write, it's wonderful to be offline for a few hours at a time.

I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable.

You can make the case that slacktivism is important because it makes people feel affiliated to a movement and be part of it, and talk about it.

The Internet challenges traditional ways of distributing and processing information and so encourages new standards and behavior.

People who know me well have learned to insist that I commit to obligations by opening my laptop and putting them onto the appropriate calendar or list - a verbal agreement and a promise to remember won't work.

When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories.

The Internet is corporations all the way down.

While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.

I'm not nearly as well organized as I would like. I am a creature of to-do lists and calendars - if something doesn't get onto my Google Calendar, I don't show up for it.

[According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population.

The culture around here is much less cutthroat than it is in, say, Silicon Valley, or even within the non-profit culture in D.C..

Twitter is my main tool for ensuring news balance.

It's becoming clear that the world is listening, so now we're trying to get new groups of people talking.